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Making Sense of Difference: How Social Location and Identity Shaped Engagements with the Hobbit Trilogy

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Fans, Blockbusterisation, and the Transformation of Cinematic Desire

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Abstract

This chapter explores the relationship between audience reception and important aspects of identity and social location, including nationality, gender, age, education and occupation, political and religious affiliations, and fandom. Drawing on a comparison of responses to multilingual post-viewing surveys for An Unexpected Journey and the larger data corpus, this chapter documents a large number of significant findings and relates these to the wider body of scholarship linking reception to aspects of social location and identity. In so doing, the chapter offers considerable empirical insight into the possible basis for differences and similarities in The Hobbit’s transnational reception within different communities of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Audience Research Unit, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

    Carolyn Michelle

  2. RTA School of Media, Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Charles H. Davis

  3. Screen and Media Studies, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

    Ann L. Hardy

  4. School of Creative Arts, The University of Newcastle, Newcastle, NSW, Australia

    Craig Hight

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Michelle, C., Davis, C.H., Hardy, A.L., Hight, C. (2017). Making Sense of Difference: How Social Location and Identity Shaped Engagements with the Hobbit Trilogy. In: Fans, Blockbusterisation, and the Transformation of Cinematic Desire. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59616-1_9

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